Review

Culture

Film & TV

Purpose

Romance

18 June 2025

5 min read

The Four Seasons and Dying for Sex hunt all of life for meaning

The TV shows joining academics exploring what it means to flourish

Giles Gough

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

Tina Fey and Michelle Williams.

A recent Harvard study revealed an intriguing relationship between religion and how well people feel their lives are going. The study suggests that there is a direct correlation between attendance at religious services and happiness.

The researchers defined ‘human flourishing’ as encompassing all aspects of a person’s life, including happiness, health, purpose, character, and relationships. Perhaps a snappier way to think of this would be “what does it mean to live a full life?.”

There must have been something in the air that leads to asking this big question, because two TV shows have come out close to the release of this study, both of which tackle what it means to have a fulfilling life. While science has only turned its attention to this topic recently, artists, philosophers and storytellers have been grappling with this one for centuries, and as science has neither Tina Fey, nor Michelle Williams, let’s see what the story tellers have to say

The Four Seasons

The Four Seasons is Netflix’s latest comedy drama series based on a 1981 Alan Alda film of the same name. In it, a group of long-time friends in their fifties, who regularly go on holiday with each other have their whole dynamic rocked when Nick (Steve Carell) tells them he plans to divorce Anne, (Kerri Kenney-Silver) his wife of 25 years. Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani) are the group’s only same sex couple, but their warm and hedonistic lifestyle is marred by Danny needing surgery for his heart condition, which he keeps putting off. Our point of view characters are Kate and Jack, played by Tina Fey and Will Forte. Initially positioned as the most normal and stable couple of the group, seeing the unhappiness in their friend’s marriages opens a fissure in their own relationship. Kate gets frustrated that Jack appears to turn into a hypochondriac when they’re in private, and Jack resents his embarrassing secrets being shared by Kate as the butt of a joke. As season one draws to a close, we are unsure if these two will repair their marriage.

The Four Seasons is a show about wanting your remaining days on this earth to be filled with meaning and passion. Dying for Sex has arguably the same motivation but on a tragically compressed timescale.

Dying for Sex

Inspired by the story of Molly Kochan and originally shared on the podcast of the same name, Dying for Sex follows Molly (Michelle Williams) as she receives a diagnosis of Stage IV metastatic breast cancer. In a moment of desperate clarity, she decides to leave her husband, Steve (Jay Duplass) and begins to explore her sexual desires for the first time in her life. Aided by her best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate), Molly dives into the world of online dating, finding partners that range from the kinky to incompetent, and finally compassionate. Molly’s one goal is to experience an orgasm with another person for once in her life. An aim that is hindered by a childhood trauma of sexual abuse. Despite the edginess of the title, Dying for Sex is a heartfelt meditation on what it means to find love just as your body is shutting down on you. It includes perhaps the best depiction of the final stages of life for a person with a terminal illness, the show is worth it for that alone.

Yet one constant remains for believers and non-believers, and it is as trite as it is true; love is the key to a fulfilled life.

It is important to note that there is a class element to both of these shows. The Four Seasons places good-looking affluent people in beautiful locations and then invites you to feel invested in their relationship drama, like an episode of 90210 for people in their fifties. Similarly, Dying for Sex sees Molly receive some of the best medical care possible, by virtue of still being on her husband’s health insurance. In a country where free health care is not seen as a basic right, the luxury of the facilities she has to hand starts to seem conspicuous. But this is not oppression Olympics and we’re not here to compare people’s pain. The less money you have will certainly decrease the amount of time you have to ponder the meaning of life, but it’s not a question that should be avoided indefinitely.

The connection between ‘human flourishing’ may be the type of thing that might get jumped on by pastors around the world. But a note of caution is advised here as to how it’s used. Firstly, the Harvard study does not appear to make any kind of distinction between religions. So, if one were to use this study to endorse being a devout Christian, then the same could be said for being a Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu etc.

Secondly, if the church tells people that becoming a Christian will statistically increase their chances of happiness, it’s doing them a disservice because Jesus never promised that. He distinctly told his followers: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” That’s a difficult line to swallow in the world of retail religion, but it borders on false advertising to ignore it.

Lastly, as critics have pointed out, even if faith improves happiness, it doesn't make the beliefs automatically true! If used as a guiding principle, the pursuit of happiness could have you swapping churches, denominations, even religions until you find what makes you happiest.

These two shows stimulate an interesting thought experiment; whether a relationship with God would have made a difference in their lives? For Kate and Jack in The Four Seasons, the answer may well have been yes. For Molly in Dying for Sex the answer is a little trickier. Jesus doesn’t condone a promiscuous lifestyle, but the drive towards that was borne out of a fundamental lack of connection with her husband. The main thing that Jesus does promise his followers is connection, either directly with him, or with those walking the same path.

You can have a fulfilling life outside of God, it would be disingenuous to say otherwise. Yet one constant remains for believers and non-believers, and it is as trite as it is true; love is the key to a fulfilled life. Molly finally attains it when she finds true love, Jack and Kate begin to lose it when they fear their love might be slipping beyond their grasp.

But the one area where faith might just differ from the secular is that Jesus lived out his time on this earth as a walking talking example of perfect love. Patient, kind, quick to forgive. The kind of example that’s impossible to completely emulate, but still worth trying.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.